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Business Intelligence
Mining Data To Find Gold
7/5/2007
It's not an insignificant problem; without data models that describe how data is stored in the backend data warehouse, and how it can be used, colleges and universities are faced with many hours of expensive consulting time to create them. Generic data models offered with BI products are usually intended for specific industries, not education (the financial sector, say, or insurance firms), and thus need extensive tailoring, if they can be used at all.iStrategy takes a different approach. Rather than selling a specific BI or data warehousing product, it calls itself a data modeling company specializing in higher education. iStrategy recommends ProClarity, a Microsoft subsidiary, as its BI tool of choice, but the company will work with many leading BI products, including Hyperion, Cognos, and Crystal Reports. On the back end, where Executive Resource Planning (ERP) systems store an institution's data in warehouses, iStrategy works with PeopleSoft, Datatel, and, shortly, Banner. iStrategy also has a partnership with Datatel, which sells iStrategy to its customers.
El-Haggan and Prasad Doddanna, director of the Office of Information Systems at Coppin State,
both have previous experience with other BI products, and were drawn to the low cost and rapid implementation iStrategy offers, they said.
Coppin State uses ProClarity as its BI tool, which it selected at the same time as iStrategy, and PeopleSoft as its ERP system. With nearly 5,000 undergraduate and graduate students and more than 600 faculty and staff members, the university has an IS department of just 9.5 full-time equivalent staff that is responsible for information services. Ease of use was important, therefore, and the iStrategy and ProClarity combo has proved to be a good solution. "It's very easy to use," El-Haggan said. "If you know how to use a browser, you're ready to go."
Despite their complexity, ERP systems often don't supply the sort of analytic reports and slice-and-dice-the-data abilities that a business intelligence solution can offer. At Coppin State, the difference between the sorts of reports the PeopleSoft system produced, and those from iStrategy, is "day and night" El-Haggan said with a laugh.
According to Doddanna, PeopleSoft's complexity in creating reports left users frustrated. "The reporting capability was very minimal out of the box," Doddanna said. "Therefore, hardly anybody used it [for reports]." Creating more complex queries required extensive training. "You have to go back and write queries because the report doesn't give you what you need.... You need to understand tables and queries and relationships," Doddanna said. And adding tools from PeopleSoft or a third party to access the PeopleSoft data warehouse more easily would have been expensive.
In iStrategy, all that work is already done, and detailed reports can be created quickly and easily from preset choices. For example, a dean or VP looking at a report on faculty workloads can tell immediately how many classes each faculty member is teaching, and what they are. Simply clicking on a line in the report "drills down" to the record level, to reveal a particular instructor's workload.
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